Alice in Bed Page 7

  “What ‘things,’ Sara? Us, you mean?”

  This, like everything else I said that day, irritated her. “What do you mean us? There is no ‘us.’ In a few years, Alice, we will marry and we’ll be occupied with housekeeping and children and what have you.”

  Really? Was that the future? We were at breakfast, and the muffin I’d been eating was stuck to my palate, dry as sawdust. I saw starkly at that moment that our relations were always conducted on Sara’s terms. Endearments such as “darling” or “dearest” were permitted, if at all, only in the night-world, but as soon as we had clothes on we had to snap back into our public characters. If I accidentally smiled too yearningly at Sara at breakfast or addressed her in fond tones, I’d pay for it with a week’s shunning. It was clear now, if not before, that I would never be happy as Sara’s lover.

  And since grand tours lasted for a year at the minimum, I would have to consider Sara dead and go through all the mourning associated with that. Because I was already losing her forever, or so it seemed to me, I dared for once to press her on the great taboo, the question of Sara and Alice.

  “How can you say ‘There is no us,’ Sara, after our nights together? If you found it so trivial, you have hidden it well. But maybe you are just a liar. Perhaps everything is only a game to you.”

  A vein throbbed at her temple, and her voice trembled. Fixing her gaze on the milk pitcher, she explained that “what we do at night” was a momentary experience of the eternal, which afterwards scattered like mercury. You should never discuss it—discuss meant tedious and ponderous in Sara-world—because that made it dead. “The eternal is like water; it flows through your fingers, you cannot hold onto it.”

  I didn’t know about the eternal, where it flowed. All I knew was that, whatever intimacies took place between us, Sara could be counted on to ignore me the next day. Most people (Fanny Morse, for instance) would probably live and die in the Boston virtues, never dreaming there were embraces that could make you weak in the knees. I sincerely wished I were one of the unawakened ones now. Sara was leaving me for a year, as if it were nothing. It was a bitter truth: the one who loves less (or not at all) has all the power, and this is why love is so painful.

  After going through the motions of bidding good-bye to Sara’s aunts, I set off down Kirkland Street, arriving at 20 Quincy Street a quarter hour later. I waved to old Mrs. Lowell, dead-heading the day lilies in her perennial bed, and went inside and waited for the tears to flow. Instead, I was dry-eyed, feeling nothing at all.

  Perhaps this was the answer. Train yourself to be a Spartan mother to your emotions. If you do have feelings, for heaven’s sake keep them to yourself. My spirits brightened at the prospect of becoming a different sort of person—healthy-minded, unemotional, detached. Whenever Sara came to mind, I dismissed her like an appointment that must be cancelled. I made a list of her annoying traits and consulted it whenever I felt stabs of longing.

  It wasn’t just Sara, either. Everyone disappointed me. Harry, who went around feeling superior to Cambridge, which he considered quite good enough for me—a mere girl, belonging to the domestic sphere. And William! Complaining in his letters from Dresden about not hearing from me and begging me to write. As if I could write in the state I was in! I still hadn’t forgiven him for deserting me without even bothering to say good-bye.

  His first letters from Germany were read aloud by Father on the verandah with the oil lamp hissing in the perfumed dark. They were passed around to family friends and read at gatherings, where everyone roared with laughter at William’s depictions of the residents of his Dresden lodging house. The landlady who kept exclaiming wunderschön about everything. The “Hamburg spinster” who queried William about a people we had with us called ‘Yankees’ about whom she had heard such strange stories and who seemed to be, if reports were true, of all the people in the world the very worst.

  His letters always made us laugh. I savored a sweet one to me in which he portrayed himself as a lovesick troubadour pursued by lovely women but remaining true to one woman, whose name he muttered under his breath—the peerless child of Quincy Street, i.e. Thou. Fanny Morse’s brow furrowed at this and she asked me later, “Why does your brother write you love letters?”

  “Don’t be silly, Fanny.” William always wrote these sorts of letters.

  As the eldest in the family, William was forever dispensing advice to the rest of us, although he himself often appeared to be the one most in need of advice. In another letter he wrote:

  Let Alice cultivate a manner clinging yet self-sustained, reserved yet confidential, let her face beam with serious beauty, & glow with quiet delight at having you speak to her; let her exhibit short glimpses of a soul with wings, as it were (but very short ones) and let her voice be musical and the tones of her voice full of caressing, and every movement of her full of grace, & you have no idea how lovely she will become.

  “Very short wings!” I grumbled to Harry. “Like a mosquito, I suppose.”

  Harry laughed. “I believe William has just described his ideal woman.” In fact, I had been quietly monitoring William’s crushes from afar and had recently written him that Fraulein Schmidt, of whom he had written a bit too warmly, must be a bold-faced jay.

  A week before their sailing date, the Nortons hosted a “last supper” to bid farewell to their friends. After dinner, everyone gathered on the piazza while Charles pontificated and Grace gazed starry-eyed at him. It was clear that the Norton sisters were on a crusade to correspond with every great (masculine) intellect in Boston and Cambridge, and were steadily extending their range to England. They considered themselves muses to men, if not scholars in their own right, and were equipped with a mysterious sense of a man’s future greatness (which Sara speculated was an instinct similar to the navigation of migratory birds). Grace and Jane Norton did not have the slightest use for their own sex.

  From the piazza, situated on the rise of a hill, we looked east, beyond the azaleas, to the tidal flats of the Charles. It was a magnificent view, changing color with the time of day, slowly fading through sunset tints of tangerine or salmon pink, through violet, mauve and indigo, to black. After sunset that night, there was no moon, and the only source of light was a smoking oil lamp at one end of the table. Sara and I were sitting at the other end, in darkness, where we could whisper to each other unmolested. (But while preserving an outward politeness, I was already striking Sara from my heart. In my mind she was as good as dead.)

  Earlier in the evening Charles had announced, “Name me any American production in which any thought appears!” No one took up this absurd challenge, and I thought I saw Susan briefly roll her eyes but she reverted so quickly to her usual expression of Supportive Wife that you could not be certain. Like many men who live inside their heads, Charles’s emotions were of a crude and infantile cast, in my view. His interactions with his infants were especially painful to behold; incapable of spontaneity, he could only mime the gestures of a devoted papa. When it came time for the children to be put to bed, he patted each on the head awkwardly and smiled sadly, as if mindful of their inevitable future as heirs to a crude, disappointing culture.

  Shortly after the eldest child had been rounded up and packed off to bed, sherry cobblers were served. Harry had been speaking reverently of Madame Bovary, whereupon Charles observed sanctimoniously that “irregular sex relations have no place in literature. The deeper passions are seldom those of illicit love.” Sara was stifling her laughter behind her fist. I was thinking, What about Abélard and Héloise? when I felt something drop into my lap. I flinched and nearly bolted out of my chair, thinking of bats. But it was Sara’s hand. Gripping my brandy glass with both hands to steady myself, I hissed at her. “Stop it!”

  She did, but only for the time it took to remove her beaded shawl from her shoulders and drape it over my lap. “I noticed you were shivering,” she whispered, and under the table her hand delved beneath my skirts and came to rest between my thighs. Say what you w
ill, she was good. I could scarcely make out her face in profile, like a queen on an ancient coin, whilst in the enchanted underworld—under the table, under the shawl—her right hand was pressed up against my drawers, having its way with me. I am sorry to say that despite my best intentions her caresses could no more be resisted than a fever, and all the time she sat composed, occasionally making remarks pertinent to the general conversation. Reveling in her power over me, like a torturer.

  At the other end of the table, meanwhile, Father was tormenting Charlemagne by insisting that the ancient Persians had a culture far more advanced than that of the Greeks at the time of the Persian Wars. Everyone had everyone else’s number here, I thought. Grace Norton had subtle ways of reducing Jane to second-ranking sister and Susan to “not really one of us.” Inclining her head toward me, Sara whispered something random about the Persians but in such a tender tone it became part of the waves of pleasure lapping through me. Bunching my linen napkin in front of my face, I had to pretend to be stifling an attack of sneezing.

  Was this Sara’s way of saying, “See what I can do to you? Won’t you miss me?”

  By now I just wanted her to leave and get it over with. But when she drew me into her bed two days before their party sailed, I succumbed helplessly, of course. How could I stay angry while Sara kissed me so thoroughly and ran her hands over my back and buttocks in a way that turned me to jelly? While my tongue traced the outline of her earlobe and inched down her neck toward her breasts, she was tugging at me with an aching desire written on her face. And then the boundary between us seemed to drop away and we melted into one rapturous, gasping person. I knew better than to mention this to Sara; it was the sort of thing she would scoff at, and I was doing my best to get over her. But the sweetness of it lingered for days.

  FOUR

  I WAS RELIEVED WHEN THE NORTONS FINALLY SAILED. NOW I could breathe more easily, put Sara out of my mind, get on with my new healthy, sane life. I had all sorts of plans. I threw myself into gardening, planting runner beans, lettuce, butternut squash, asters, and chrysanthemums. I spent hours watering and weeding and staking and pruning and fighting off insects. I liked the sight of the dirt in the creases of my palms, proof that I’d done something earthy and real for a change. Some days I tried being a social butterfly, attending teas and receptions and making bright, animated chit-chat. In the evenings I went to lectures and pronounced them “fascinating.” I went to bed exhausted.

  Harry, meeting me on the stairs, looked baffled. “What has gotten into you, sister of mine?”

  “What do you mean, Harry?”

  “Where is your stylish languor, your feminine vapors? Next thing we know you’ll turn into Aunt Kate.”

  “What about you, Harry? How is the law business coming?”

  “Fine,” he said unconvincingly.

  I gave him a jaunty little wave and continued on my way upstairs to help Mother muck out the attic. The next day we beat the carpets, and a few days later I let Fanny talk me into coming along on her home visit to one of her immigrant families, and tried to overcome the nausea that would strike me inside those fetid rooms. I kept telling myself I would get used to it, but who was I fooling? A single glance from Sara could undo in an instant all my emotional fortifications and bring me to my knees. In her absence even a stranger with the same way of tilting her head while she laughed could make me catch my breath.

  I was distracted from this monomania, fortunately, by a visit from our Temple cousins, which had the added benefit of providing me with material for my next letter to William. I informed him that Minny—his and Harry’s favorite of the girls—was not as interesting as she used to be. I attributed this to her being too much influenced by the last person she talked to, so that you never knew where you’d find her. I also described for him the view from my window of the Lowells’ garden, where Effie Shaw was seated, looking as lovely as ever. She was the beautiful widow of the dead Civil War hero, Charles Lowell, and sister of Robert Shaw, another fallen hero. She regularly brought her small orphaned daughter to visit her in-laws. How I envied her! To go through life as the tragic widow of a war hero, mother of an orphan. Nothing more would be expected of Effie; she could rest on her laurels.

  Clover Hooper sometimes came out to spend the day with Effie, and sometimes Clover and I would exchange a few words over the fence. She still threatens to invite me to dinner, I wrote William, but has never been able to bring her mind to the point of doing so yet, although from what she says she encourages me to think that she tries very hard. I did not tell William how hungrily I’d waited for the dinner invitation that never came. Nor that at a recent dinner party I’d overheard Mrs. Howells asking Clover, “What do you think of Harry James’s Galaxy heroine? She reminds me of a great many people in general but no one in particular.” To which Clover replied, “I think as usual the boy has chawed more than he can bite off.”

  A week after the Temples departed, Mother solicited my help in choosing new wallpapers for one of the parlors. We set out all the samples and stared at them from up close and across the room, but I could not find my way to an opinion. While pondering the wallpaper, Mother confided that she hoped William would not “waste his opportunity” in Germany, as a number of shares of real estate in upstate New York had to be sold to send him there. There had been, as I recalled, a slight unpleasantness about money—bad investments by Father, corrective action by Mother.

  “Is it so very expensive?”

  “Well, your father’s immortal work certainly won’t pay for it!”

  This was a shock. I’d always assumed that Mother was a fond handmaid to Father’s genius. She sat at his lectures beaming like a madonna, and was disappointed when his self-published books did not sell well (or, to be completely accurate, at all). To Father, this world was a shadow of the real, a sort of mass hallucination. He was always urging us children to pluck out the thorn of our egotism and recover our Divine Nature, and Mother endorsed this project one hundred percent. When, as children, one of us was yelling or pouting or pulling another’s hair, she’d say, in an admonitory tone, “D.N., dear.” Since we were educated at home, it was some time before I discovered that other families did not march to the drumbeat of D.N.

  Now I wondered if, to Mother, Father’s Ideas were only the hobbyhorse of a lovable crank. Her pride in knowing how to stretch a dollar, her mania for order and her relentless housecleaning might be seen in a new light. Someone had to take care of business, she must have reckoned as a young bride. Father drifted here and there like a will-o’-the-wisp, charming roomfuls of people with his intoxicating talk, writing esoteric books and giving esoteric lectures, going off on mysterious journeys by himself, while Mother did the hard work of keeping the family going.

  Efficient and energetic, Mother could probably have run a small nation—if nations were ever governed by those wearing skirts. To me she seemed equal to any task but one: managing French servants. How disturbing it had been, when we lived in a grand rented house on the Champs-Élysées during our childhood abroad, to hear the servants mocking Mother’s accent and running circles around her, Françoise the cook whispering to Aurore, the head parlormaid, “Madame speaks French like a Spanish cow,” Aurore observing, while hanging Mother’s and Aunt Kate’s nightdresses on the line in the courtyard, that “Monsieur has two wives like a Mohammedan.” I was seven years old and knew almost nothing, but I had quickly and effortlessly picked up the French language. To see Mother cowed by the French was shocking, like discovering that God did not care whether people were good or bad.

  ***

  Casting Sara out of my heart was proving more difficult than expected. By summer’s end, I’d stopped calling on people or going on picnics, sails, rides, or walks. I said I was tired but it was really that nothing seemed worth the effort. I turned down Fanny’s invitations until she was telegraphing me concerned looks whenever we met. The vegetables and flowers I’d planted went unweeded and unwatered. It required a Herculean effort to
move myself from the parlor to the verandah. Aunt Kate made noises about the bad airs that came up from the marsh this time of year, and I said, yes, that must be it, but it was not.

  I could not even eat a peach now because Sara loved them so.

  One morning I woke up with my heart racing and a sensation that my breath was being sucked out of me. It was horrible, annihilating. For a few minutes I was unable to move, speak, or think. Was this what madness was? Aunt Janet loomed in my memory, trembling like a leaf in a gale and jabbering about a plot by the Albany newspaper to omit key ingredients from its recipe for pound cake. And my cousin Kitty James Prince with her God-dazzled eyes and her schemes for putting clothing on dogs and cats for the sake of decency. I would have to discontinue myself if I got like that.

  At breakfast Mother and Aunt Kate asked me if I felt all right, and I said I did. Later I admitted that my nerves were troubling me, and that the world seemed blurry and far away.

  Aunt Kate said, “Well, darling, I know just the medical man for you. Dr. Munro will put you right.”

  She went on to say that he had completely cured her nerves and back. “Now whenever I feel nervy or have lumbago or a neurasthenic headache or anything at all, I have a few sessions with the doctor, and I’m right as rain. The man is a miracle-worker!”

  A few days later I was in his treatment room.

  When I think of Dr. Munro, I see his hands, large and square, with springy copper-colored hair at the wrists. His treatment room was in his home on Beacon Street, a tall, narrow building of maroon brick across from the Public Garden. I rang the doorbell under the brass plaque with DR. EDWARD MUNRO on it, and a servant directed me down a murky corridor past portraits of stern, unsmiling Puritan ancestors. The first time I saw Dr. Munro, I was put off by his squint, which made you think of a troll you must meet and overcome in a fairy tale. But I knew that Aunt Kate’s health had been improved by seeing him, and his manner was all benevolence.